Reliable Narrators?

Driving wedge-shaped salients into oblivion.

Something got me thinking about reliable narrators. The term we usually hear is 'unreliable narrator', of course, but this implies the existence of the converse.

This came to mind in relation to one of the 20 books I’ve been posting as part of a challenge on Bluesky: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915—2011. Very soon after it occurred to me that another author who’d be interesting to consider in this light is Scottish mountaineer W.H. Murray (1913—1996), as cited by my friend Ronald Turnbull in the latest post, the second of a mini-series on Romanticism and its legacy in modern mountain writing, in his excellent About Mountains Substack.

To start, we need to look at the particular circumstances around the writing of each of these books.

A Time of Gifts was published in 1977, but it tells the tale of a journey across Europe, mostly on foot, which began in 1933. More precisely, it tackles the first part of the journey, as far as the crossing from Czechoslovakia into Hungary. Two further volumes, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), and The Broken Road (completed from notes and diaries by Artemis Cooper and published posthumously in 2013), complete the journey to Constantinople.

What we have, then, is a journey undertaken by a very young man (not yet 19 when he set out), but fashioned into a book by a man in his sixties. As Jan Morris put it in an introduction to one edition:

Its journey is in effect evoked for us by two people: the carefree young dropout who experienced it […] and the immensely experienced author who, knowing more about history forty years later, turned it into art.

It’s even possible that the book might never have materialised at all: the journal covering part of the journey was lost along the way and luckily recovered in 1939 (and can now be viewed online courtesy of the National Library of Scotland). A later notebook was missing for even longer before being recovered. And even with the notebooks in front of him, PLF found that their coverage was more patchy than he’d thought.

As he says, in a companion Introductory Letter in A Time of Gifts: “This book is an attempt to set in order, with as much detail as I can recapture, the earliest of these disjointedly recounted travels.”

PLF is open about these deficiencies and there are frequent references to the uncertainty of some of the recollected images, as in this passage cited in a review by Andrew Merrils:

Where, in this half-recollected maze, do the reviving memories of the libraries belong? To the Old University, perhaps, one of the most ancient and famous in Europe, founded by the great King Charles IV in 1384. I’m not sure. But I drive wedge-shaped salients into oblivion nevertheless and follow them through the recoiling mists with enfilading perspectives of books until bay after bay coheres.

'Wedge-shaped salients into oblivion…' How’s that for an image?

At least PLF had some contemporary notes to refer to. Bill Murray had none. The first draft of Mountaineering in Scotland (click for a short review by Substacker Alex Roddie) was written, on purloined toilet paper, while Murray was a prisoner of war. Tough enough, you might think, but this draft was found and destroyed… so, despite health problems brought on by the bad conditions, he set to to write it again.

Admittedly Murray wasn’t writing forty years after the event. Most of the climbing related in the book was accomplished in the few years leading up to the War, and his clandestine writing in its final years, so the lapse of time was between five and ten years. On the other hand, it was a memory exercise pure and simple—well, maybe not so simple.

I can testify from my own experience that climbing, especially when you’re nearing the limits of your skill and perhaps pushing the envelope further than is really comfortable, does tend to concentrate the mind wonderfully. And this undoubtedly helps vivid recall. You only need to watch a few climbers in the café or pub afterwards; in fact you can often recognise them by the strange little mimes re-enacting particular moves, the odd gestures showing exactly how the fingers grasped a tenuous edge or crystal. I’ve done it myself—but hours later, not years.

I have had occasion to revisit some of my own most memorable mountain experiences. Quite a few were written up soon after for magazine articles, and there were some which made their way into books. But even with reference to those records, I don’t have the sort of richly detailed recall that both PLF and Bill Murray display. I revisited the origins of my first ever published article for a story which, it seems, I got part way to publishing here but never completed… so at present it’s only on my blog. Naturally I re-read the original piece (published in early 1987) but even with that in front of me I couldn’t recapture the finer detail of, say, the off-width on Traumpfeiler in Meteora—though I do recall the way the 53-year-old Dietrich Hasse¹ floated up it.

Some of the rock towers of Meteora, Greece, with ‘The Holy Ghost’ on the right. Two climbers are just visible as sunlit dots against shadowed rock at far right; they’re on Traumpfeiler.

What does, however, persist, certainly for me, is a broader sense of what it was like; the setting, the atmosphere (and Meteora in Greece is a unique climbing place to climb), the curious texture of the conglomerate rock, my awe at the eminence of my rope-mate.

Sometimes, too, I might recall specific moments, specific moves: the undercling traverse on Kipling Groove in the Lakes, or launching out over the overhang on Equus on the same crag; the sheer brazenness of the main wall pitch on Central Pillar on Esk Buttress. All these are pitches that I led, and it’s often said the being 'on the sharp end' does heighten concentration, which might well sharpen recall.

Then again, one can get pretty involved watching someone else leading a pitch, especially when you’re the one holding the rope. I’ll never forget one friend (who’ll remain nameless) muttering a steady fuck… fuck… fuck…² as she inched across the traverse of Slip Knot on White Gill Crag. And I was certainly highly invested as I managed Dave Pegg’s³ ropes as he attempted what was to become The Last Temptation on the somewhat esoteric Thorn Crag on the slopes of Ward’s Stone in Lancashire. Good thing I was paying attention, too, as he came off, flipped upside down, and ended up with his head inches above a pointed boulder. If I hadn’t immediately stepped back and down to take in the slack… Well, Dave credited me with saving his life.

Dave Pegg, this time belayed by Ashley Lewis, on the successful first ascent of The Last Temptation, E6 6c, Thorn Crag.

And clear memories don’t only spring from the 'extreme' end of things (the climbs mentioned aren’t by any means in the upper end of the grading spectrum, but they were close to my personal limit). There are other moments that linger too, like the time I lost my glasses on Cornwall’s Commando Ridge, and my climbing partner had to direct me as I climbed down half-blind to the ledge where—very fortunately—they had landed.

And there are moments, feelings, sights, that persist from less overtly hard-core mountain experiences too. Crossing the Brèche de Roland in the Pyrenees and feeling as if we’d stepped from winter into… well, spring, if not summer. The sound and pungent aroma of sulphurous steam in the crater of Ngāuruhoe⁴ on the Tongariro Crossing. A Brocken Spectre on Sgùrr an Iubhair in the Mamores.

South Crater and Ngāuruhoe, on the Tongariro Crossing.

I didn’t put a Brocken Spectre into my descriptions of mountain Crossings in The Sundering Wall or Vows and Watersheds. I could have done, and maybe it would have prompted an interesting discussion about how to explain the phenomenon—Jerya and Hedric in Vows… would have enjoyed getting their teeth into that.. I missed that opportunity, but plenty of other elements from my mountain experience fed into those books (and do again in Stones and Secrets). And, rather as in the Jan Morris observation about PLF, it’s the experience of a younger person filtered through the mind of an older one.

But these reflections began with Patrick Leigh Fermor, not a noted mountaineer, so let’s come back to the broader question of how far we can rely on our memories. Back in August I wrote a Post about how I first encountered some of my favourite authors. Some of the details I’m quite sure about, some less so.

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My Mum definitely gave me my first copy of Swallows and Amazons at a wedding—but am I quite sure it was in Warrington? Am I sure I was nine? Might I have been eight? Or even seven (the same age as Roger, as given in the first line'⁵ of the book)?

And there’s no doubt that I acquired Pride and Prejudice in a bookshop in Islamabad (and therefore it was certainly 1990). But am I quite sure, on reflection that, as I stated in my Post, "I finished it on the flight home"?

I’m clearest about the fourth of the books I featured, Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. Yes, it’s probably the most recent, though I can’t pin down the date more precisely than somewhere between 1988 and the early months of 1994. But I remember picking it up when going round the Library one morning before opening, realising it wasn’t a library book, and adding it to the lost property box. I could add a good deal more detail, like the narrow little storeroom where the lost property shelf was (and where I used to change after cycling in or before cycling home); the fact that I volunteered for the job of sorting the unclaimed lost property at the end of each term, because no one else was particularly interested and it gave me first dibs every time. But Patrick Leigh Fermor would probably be able to say what else he acquired by the same means, and perhaps list everything else that was in the pile on the Wyrd Sisters occasion. And if I was putting this anecdote into a novel (Behind the Scene at the Library?), I’d also have to provide at least some of this sort of detail to flesh out the story.

Also, Wyrd Sisters is the only one of the books discussed in my Post where I’m absolutely sure what the cover looked like… because I still have that same copy. I first read The Lord of the Rings as a borrowed copy… and what happened to my original copies of Swallows and Amazons and Pride and Prejudice I have no idea.

My memory’s full of gaps like that… but isn’t everyone’s?

1. Probably the most famous climber I’ve ever tied on a rope with.

2. Possibly just quoting the opening scene of Four Weddings and a Funeral, of course.

3. A second candidate for 'most famous climber I’ve ever tied on a rope with'—but this time I’d have had no chance of following the pitch if he had completed it on that attempt. And we never did do any other route together. Sadly, and shockingly, Dave took his own life a few years later.

4. A mountain of great significance to local Māori long before Peter Jackson 'borrowed' it to stand in for Mount Doom.
We were there in 1995; more recently New Zealand’s Department of Conservation has requested visitors not to climb its slope. This may not be unconnected with its appearance in the film and the subsequent boost in tourist numbers.

5. "Roger, aged seven, and no longest the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays."